Thomas F. Haddox
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823225217
- eISBN:
- 9780823236947
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823225217.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
This book charts what has been a largely unexplored literary landscape, looking at the work of such diverse writers as the gens de couleur libre poets of antebellum New Orleans, Kate ...
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This book charts what has been a largely unexplored literary landscape, looking at the work of such diverse writers as the gens de couleur libre poets of antebellum New Orleans, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Carson McCullers, Margaret Mitchell, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and John Kennedy Toole. It shows that Catholicism and its Church have always been a presence, albeit in different ways, in the southern cultural tradition. For some, Catholicism has been associated with miscegenation and with the political aspirations of African Americans; for others, it has served as the model for the feudal and patriarchal society that some southern whites sought to establish; for still others, it has presented a gorgeous aesthetic spectacle associated with decadence and homoeroticism; and for still others, it has marked a quotidian, do-it-yourself “lifestyle” attractive for its lack of concern with southern anxieties about honor. By focusing on the shifting and contradictory ways Catholicism has signified within southern literature and culture, this book contributes to a more nuanced understanding of American and southern literary and cultural history.Less
This book charts what has been a largely unexplored literary landscape, looking at the work of such diverse writers as the gens de couleur libre poets of antebellum New Orleans, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Carson McCullers, Margaret Mitchell, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and John Kennedy Toole. It shows that Catholicism and its Church have always been a presence, albeit in different ways, in the southern cultural tradition. For some, Catholicism has been associated with miscegenation and with the political aspirations of African Americans; for others, it has served as the model for the feudal and patriarchal society that some southern whites sought to establish; for still others, it has presented a gorgeous aesthetic spectacle associated with decadence and homoeroticism; and for still others, it has marked a quotidian, do-it-yourself “lifestyle” attractive for its lack of concern with southern anxieties about honor. By focusing on the shifting and contradictory ways Catholicism has signified within southern literature and culture, this book contributes to a more nuanced understanding of American and southern literary and cultural history.
David A. Davis
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781496815415
- eISBN:
- 9781496815453
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496815415.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
When the United States entered World War I, parts of the country had developed industries, urban cultures, and democratic political systems, but the South lagged behind, remaining an impoverished, ...
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When the United States entered World War I, parts of the country had developed industries, urban cultures, and democratic political systems, but the South lagged behind, remaining an impoverished, agriculture region. Despite New South boosterism, the culture of the early twentieth-century South was comparatively artistically arid. Yet, southern writers dominated the literary marketplace by the 1920s and 1930s.
World War I brought southerners into contact with modernity before the South fully modernized. This shortfall created an inherent tension between the region’s existing agricultural social structure and the processes of modernization, leading to distal modernism, a form of writing that combines elements of modernism to depict non-modern social structures. Critics have struggled to formulate explanations for the eruption of modern southern literature, sometimes called the Southern Renaissance.
Pinpointing World War I as the catalyst, this book argues southern modernism was not a self-generating outburst of writing, but a response to the disruptions modernity generated in the region. World War I and Southern Modernism examines dozens of works of literature by writers, including William Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, and Claude McKay, that depict the South during the war. Topics explored in the book include contact between the North and the South, southerners who served in combat, and the developing southern economy. This book also provides a new lens for this argument, taking a closer look at African Americans in the military and changing gender roles.Less
When the United States entered World War I, parts of the country had developed industries, urban cultures, and democratic political systems, but the South lagged behind, remaining an impoverished, agriculture region. Despite New South boosterism, the culture of the early twentieth-century South was comparatively artistically arid. Yet, southern writers dominated the literary marketplace by the 1920s and 1930s.
World War I brought southerners into contact with modernity before the South fully modernized. This shortfall created an inherent tension between the region’s existing agricultural social structure and the processes of modernization, leading to distal modernism, a form of writing that combines elements of modernism to depict non-modern social structures. Critics have struggled to formulate explanations for the eruption of modern southern literature, sometimes called the Southern Renaissance.
Pinpointing World War I as the catalyst, this book argues southern modernism was not a self-generating outburst of writing, but a response to the disruptions modernity generated in the region. World War I and Southern Modernism examines dozens of works of literature by writers, including William Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, and Claude McKay, that depict the South during the war. Topics explored in the book include contact between the North and the South, southerners who served in combat, and the developing southern economy. This book also provides a new lens for this argument, taking a closer look at African Americans in the military and changing gender roles.
Thomas F. Haddox
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823225217
- eISBN:
- 9780823236947
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823225217.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
Even after several decades of attention to her work, Flannery O'Connor's critics can be grouped into those who read her primarily through a theological lens and those who focus ...
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Even after several decades of attention to her work, Flannery O'Connor's critics can be grouped into those who read her primarily through a theological lens and those who focus primarily on her regional identification. If theological readings tend to dilute the cultural specificity of O'Connor's work, “southern” readings of O'Connor tend to reduce her religious concerns to a mere by-product of the South's “Christ-haunted” cultural context. Implicit in both kinds of readings is the notion that O'Connor is an anomalous figure, central both to southern and Catholic literary traditions, but comfortably situated in neither. O'Connor, however, saw her identities as southerner and Catholic neither as complementary nor as merely additive. By identifying the “best traditions” of the South and the church as “the same”, O'Connor suggests that one should not be deceived by the widespread anti-Catholicism of the twentieth-century Protestant South.Less
Even after several decades of attention to her work, Flannery O'Connor's critics can be grouped into those who read her primarily through a theological lens and those who focus primarily on her regional identification. If theological readings tend to dilute the cultural specificity of O'Connor's work, “southern” readings of O'Connor tend to reduce her religious concerns to a mere by-product of the South's “Christ-haunted” cultural context. Implicit in both kinds of readings is the notion that O'Connor is an anomalous figure, central both to southern and Catholic literary traditions, but comfortably situated in neither. O'Connor, however, saw her identities as southerner and Catholic neither as complementary nor as merely additive. By identifying the “best traditions” of the South and the church as “the same”, O'Connor suggests that one should not be deceived by the widespread anti-Catholicism of the twentieth-century Protestant South.
Thomas F. Haddox
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823225217
- eISBN:
- 9780823236947
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823225217.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
The planter as kindly lord of the manor is a familiar trope in nineteenth-century southern literature — pastoral and paternalist are the standard adjectives used to describe ...
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The planter as kindly lord of the manor is a familiar trope in nineteenth-century southern literature — pastoral and paternalist are the standard adjectives used to describe this characterization — and its relation to a proslavery ideology that would equate the plantation system with feudalism has been widely recognized. Southern partisans, both in literature and politics, tended to view both slavery and the tightly controlled republican government that protected it as extensions of the patriarchal family. What has been less recognized is that for many southern apologists, this “medievalist” ideology ultimately required a religious grounding. The irruption of “history” into medieval Christendom under the rubrics of Enlightenment, Reformation, secularization and emerging capitalism could only be combated by the recovery or preservation of medieval principles — one of which was the totalizing and hierarchical ordering epitomized in the Great Chain of Being and underwritten by Roman Catholicism.Less
The planter as kindly lord of the manor is a familiar trope in nineteenth-century southern literature — pastoral and paternalist are the standard adjectives used to describe this characterization — and its relation to a proslavery ideology that would equate the plantation system with feudalism has been widely recognized. Southern partisans, both in literature and politics, tended to view both slavery and the tightly controlled republican government that protected it as extensions of the patriarchal family. What has been less recognized is that for many southern apologists, this “medievalist” ideology ultimately required a religious grounding. The irruption of “history” into medieval Christendom under the rubrics of Enlightenment, Reformation, secularization and emerging capitalism could only be combated by the recovery or preservation of medieval principles — one of which was the totalizing and hierarchical ordering epitomized in the Great Chain of Being and underwritten by Roman Catholicism.
David A. Davis (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781496815415
- eISBN:
- 9781496815453
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496815415.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
World War I brought southerners into contact with modernity at a distance, but World War II brought modernity to the South. The inherent tension between the South’s rural, agricultural social ...
More
World War I brought southerners into contact with modernity at a distance, but World War II brought modernity to the South. The inherent tension between the South’s rural, agricultural social structure and the urbanizing, industrializing processes of modernity generated a distinctive form of distal modernism in the work of southern writers after World War I. After World War II, however, the South itself began modernizing, becoming more urban and more industrial and leading many southerners to adopt mainstream American social practices. As the South became a proximal site of modernity, it became less distinctive as a region, southern identity became a less stable construction, and southern literature became more consistent with mainstream American literature.Less
World War I brought southerners into contact with modernity at a distance, but World War II brought modernity to the South. The inherent tension between the South’s rural, agricultural social structure and the urbanizing, industrializing processes of modernity generated a distinctive form of distal modernism in the work of southern writers after World War I. After World War II, however, the South itself began modernizing, becoming more urban and more industrial and leading many southerners to adopt mainstream American social practices. As the South became a proximal site of modernity, it became less distinctive as a region, southern identity became a less stable construction, and southern literature became more consistent with mainstream American literature.
Ellen Crowell
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748625482
- eISBN:
- 9780748652051
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748625482.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter compares dandyism in Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Southern literature, focusing on Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent and John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn. It argues that in these two ...
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This chapter compares dandyism in Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Southern literature, focusing on Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent and John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn. It argues that in these two texts, considered as foundational in the Irish big house and southern plantation novel traditions, the dandy figure's cultural and sexual decadence threatens colonial aristocracy. The chapter suggests that a common merger of aesthetics and proactive reform links the Anglo-Irish big house and Southern plantation novel literary traditions from their inception.Less
This chapter compares dandyism in Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Southern literature, focusing on Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent and John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn. It argues that in these two texts, considered as foundational in the Irish big house and southern plantation novel traditions, the dandy figure's cultural and sexual decadence threatens colonial aristocracy. The chapter suggests that a common merger of aesthetics and proactive reform links the Anglo-Irish big house and Southern plantation novel literary traditions from their inception.
Kathryn Stelmach Artuso
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617037986
- eISBN:
- 9781621039525
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617037986.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
This chapter examines the transatlantic friendship between Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen, which provides invaluable insights into the aesthetic and intercultural transactions between Irish and ...
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This chapter examines the transatlantic friendship between Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen, which provides invaluable insights into the aesthetic and intercultural transactions between Irish and southern literature, specifically through their oeuvre of short stories and their critical insights into the form. It shows how the often-asserted cultural compatibility of the Irish and southern literary renaissances might be perceptual and coincidental, shortchanging the individuality of writers who offer their personal maturation as a model for regional and national regeneration.Less
This chapter examines the transatlantic friendship between Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen, which provides invaluable insights into the aesthetic and intercultural transactions between Irish and southern literature, specifically through their oeuvre of short stories and their critical insights into the form. It shows how the often-asserted cultural compatibility of the Irish and southern literary renaissances might be perceptual and coincidental, shortchanging the individuality of writers who offer their personal maturation as a model for regional and national regeneration.
Noel Polk
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781934110843
- eISBN:
- 9781604733235
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781934110843.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
As one of the preeminent scholars of southern literature, Noel Polk has delivered lectures, written journal articles and essays, and discussed the rich legacy of the South’s literary heritage around ...
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As one of the preeminent scholars of southern literature, Noel Polk has delivered lectures, written journal articles and essays, and discussed the rich legacy of the South’s literary heritage around the world for over three decades. His work on William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other writers is incisive and groundbreaking. Polk’s essays in this book maintain an abiding interest in his major area of literary study: the relationship between the smaller units of construction in a literary work and the work’s larger themes. The analysis of this interplay between commas and dashes, curious occlusions, passages, and characters who have often gone unnoticed in the critical discourse—the bricks and mortar, as it were—and a work’s grand design is a crucial aspect of Polk’s scholarship. The book is a collection of his essays from the late 1970s to 2005. Featuring an introduction that places Faulkner and Welty at the center of the South’s literary heritage, it asks useful, probing questions about southern literature and provides insightful analysis.Less
As one of the preeminent scholars of southern literature, Noel Polk has delivered lectures, written journal articles and essays, and discussed the rich legacy of the South’s literary heritage around the world for over three decades. His work on William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other writers is incisive and groundbreaking. Polk’s essays in this book maintain an abiding interest in his major area of literary study: the relationship between the smaller units of construction in a literary work and the work’s larger themes. The analysis of this interplay between commas and dashes, curious occlusions, passages, and characters who have often gone unnoticed in the critical discourse—the bricks and mortar, as it were—and a work’s grand design is a crucial aspect of Polk’s scholarship. The book is a collection of his essays from the late 1970s to 2005. Featuring an introduction that places Faulkner and Welty at the center of the South’s literary heritage, it asks useful, probing questions about southern literature and provides insightful analysis.
Alison Mandaville
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617030185
- eISBN:
- 9781621032212
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617030185.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
In his 2007 book The Fire This Time, North Carolina author Randall Kenan associates comics with sex and sin. This relationship is evident in his postmodern prose novel A Visitation of Spirits (1989), ...
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In his 2007 book The Fire This Time, North Carolina author Randall Kenan associates comics with sex and sin. This relationship is evident in his postmodern prose novel A Visitation of Spirits (1989), where Horace Cross, a gay African American teenager in a conservative religious community, struggles to articulate what he feels is the consummate sin of his queer sexual desires. This chapter examines A Visitation of Spirits and the protagonist’s attempts to imagine an alternative way of being in the world, suggesting the dense imbrication of visual and oral cultures of the South. It provides an overview of the connection between comics and oral literature within the framework of Kenan’s novel and the way orality remains a powerful marker by which to characterize southern literature.Less
In his 2007 book The Fire This Time, North Carolina author Randall Kenan associates comics with sex and sin. This relationship is evident in his postmodern prose novel A Visitation of Spirits (1989), where Horace Cross, a gay African American teenager in a conservative religious community, struggles to articulate what he feels is the consummate sin of his queer sexual desires. This chapter examines A Visitation of Spirits and the protagonist’s attempts to imagine an alternative way of being in the world, suggesting the dense imbrication of visual and oral cultures of the South. It provides an overview of the connection between comics and oral literature within the framework of Kenan’s novel and the way orality remains a powerful marker by which to characterize southern literature.
Wade Newhouse
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781496802330
- eISBN:
- 9781496804990
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496802330.003.0020
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter discusses Brad Watson's 2002 novel The Heaven of Mercury, which lies squarely amid the matrix of evolving and competing Souths. It has recently become standard at conferences and in ...
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This chapter discusses Brad Watson's 2002 novel The Heaven of Mercury, which lies squarely amid the matrix of evolving and competing Souths. It has recently become standard at conferences and in journals devoted to southern literature to ask whether southern literature itself is still a distinct category. For scholars in new southern studies, “southern” literature includes work produced as far from the old Confederacy as Caribbean and Central American nations, while critics have declared that novels as canonically New England as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851) unconsciously depend upon an antebellum southern agrarian ideal. A native of Mississippi who spent time in Florida, Watson is by rights a true southerner, without such common qualifiers as “adopted” or “expatriate” to dilute his pedigree.Less
This chapter discusses Brad Watson's 2002 novel The Heaven of Mercury, which lies squarely amid the matrix of evolving and competing Souths. It has recently become standard at conferences and in journals devoted to southern literature to ask whether southern literature itself is still a distinct category. For scholars in new southern studies, “southern” literature includes work produced as far from the old Confederacy as Caribbean and Central American nations, while critics have declared that novels as canonically New England as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851) unconsciously depend upon an antebellum southern agrarian ideal. A native of Mississippi who spent time in Florida, Watson is by rights a true southerner, without such common qualifiers as “adopted” or “expatriate” to dilute his pedigree.
Angie Maxwell
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781469611648
- eISBN:
- 9781469614519
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469611648.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, Social History
The public criticism of the South was not limited to religious fundamentalism, but spread to southern art and letters and culture in general. This chapter focuses on the Fugitive poets of Nashville, ...
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The public criticism of the South was not limited to religious fundamentalism, but spread to southern art and letters and culture in general. This chapter focuses on the Fugitive poets of Nashville, Tennessee—Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren. These Fugitives expressed, in their correspondence and in their writings, their sense of alienation and their quest for recognition. Their aesthetic and political choices reflected a shared sense of inferiority and their struggle to overcome it and to secure acceptance and acknowledgment in the literary world.Less
The public criticism of the South was not limited to religious fundamentalism, but spread to southern art and letters and culture in general. This chapter focuses on the Fugitive poets of Nashville, Tennessee—Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren. These Fugitives expressed, in their correspondence and in their writings, their sense of alienation and their quest for recognition. Their aesthetic and political choices reflected a shared sense of inferiority and their struggle to overcome it and to secure acceptance and acknowledgment in the literary world.
Christopher Hanlon
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199937585
- eISBN:
- 9780199333103
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937585.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines the resonance of the English picturesque in the U.S. South, arguing that while southern appreciators of landscape during the antebellum period admired the picturesque for ...
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This chapter examines the resonance of the English picturesque in the U.S. South, arguing that while southern appreciators of landscape during the antebellum period admired the picturesque for reasons similar to their northeastern counterparts, the aesthetic also resonated in the slave-holding south for its conservative semiotics of labor, which suppressed viewer’s sympathetic responses to impoverished rural workers by idealizing them or keeping them in the distance. John Pendleton Kennedy’s novel Swallow Barn (1832, 1851) registers a southern picturesque mode of the James River Valley of Upper Virginia, where indeed the euphemistic properties of the picturesque licenses an idealizing view of slavery. Interestingly, however, Kennedy’s novel not only indebts itself to the picturesque but also subverts its formulae in repeatedly violating its strictures on middle ground and distant space, drawing the reader into landscapes normally left unexplored in picturesque painting. In the process, the novel challenges the economies of slavery the southern picturesque would otherwise enjoin.Less
This chapter examines the resonance of the English picturesque in the U.S. South, arguing that while southern appreciators of landscape during the antebellum period admired the picturesque for reasons similar to their northeastern counterparts, the aesthetic also resonated in the slave-holding south for its conservative semiotics of labor, which suppressed viewer’s sympathetic responses to impoverished rural workers by idealizing them or keeping them in the distance. John Pendleton Kennedy’s novel Swallow Barn (1832, 1851) registers a southern picturesque mode of the James River Valley of Upper Virginia, where indeed the euphemistic properties of the picturesque licenses an idealizing view of slavery. Interestingly, however, Kennedy’s novel not only indebts itself to the picturesque but also subverts its formulae in repeatedly violating its strictures on middle ground and distant space, drawing the reader into landscapes normally left unexplored in picturesque painting. In the process, the novel challenges the economies of slavery the southern picturesque would otherwise enjoin.
Barbara C. Ewell
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617033032
- eISBN:
- 9781617033056
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617033032.003.0017
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This chapter explores the writing of Kate Chopin, focusing on her novel The Awakening. It argues that while Chopin is not technically a southerner and The Awakening does not always “feel” like a ...
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This chapter explores the writing of Kate Chopin, focusing on her novel The Awakening. It argues that while Chopin is not technically a southerner and The Awakening does not always “feel” like a southern novel, both writer and text were shaped by the very specific contexts of southern literature. By setting her novel in south Louisiana, Chopin was also engaging issues critical to southern identity.Less
This chapter explores the writing of Kate Chopin, focusing on her novel The Awakening. It argues that while Chopin is not technically a southerner and The Awakening does not always “feel” like a southern novel, both writer and text were shaped by the very specific contexts of southern literature. By setting her novel in south Louisiana, Chopin was also engaging issues critical to southern identity.
Erik Bledsoe
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781496802330
- eISBN:
- 9781496804990
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496802330.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter discusses the emergence of a new generation of southern writers who are giving voice to a different group of southerners, forcing their readers to reexamine long-held stereotypes and ...
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This chapter discusses the emergence of a new generation of southern writers who are giving voice to a different group of southerners, forcing their readers to reexamine long-held stereotypes and beliefs while challenging the literary roles traditionally assigned poor whites. According to Linda Tate, “traditionally, southern literature has been understood to be that written by white men and, on rare occasions, by white women—and, in almost all cases, by and about white southerners of the upper middle class.” This chapter looks at three new voices who write about the Rough South and the southern poor whites from within the class: Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, and Timothy Reese McLaurin. The term “Rough South” refers to as the world of the redneck or white trash. The terms “redneck,” “white trash,” “cracker,” and “poor white” have all been used to describe certain white southerners.Less
This chapter discusses the emergence of a new generation of southern writers who are giving voice to a different group of southerners, forcing their readers to reexamine long-held stereotypes and beliefs while challenging the literary roles traditionally assigned poor whites. According to Linda Tate, “traditionally, southern literature has been understood to be that written by white men and, on rare occasions, by white women—and, in almost all cases, by and about white southerners of the upper middle class.” This chapter looks at three new voices who write about the Rough South and the southern poor whites from within the class: Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, and Timothy Reese McLaurin. The term “Rough South” refers to as the world of the redneck or white trash. The terms “redneck,” “white trash,” “cracker,” and “poor white” have all been used to describe certain white southerners.
Thadious M. Davis
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617033032
- eISBN:
- 9781617033056
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617033032.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This chapter attempts to provide a definition for a Southern woman writer. It asks: Who or what is a Southern woman writer? Should the emphasis be placed on Southern or on woman, or equally on both? ...
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This chapter attempts to provide a definition for a Southern woman writer. It asks: Who or what is a Southern woman writer? Should the emphasis be placed on Southern or on woman, or equally on both? An examination of writers who are or have been considered Southern yields the following attributes. One is that place of birth in itself is not a major factor in determining a Southern writer. More important than place of birth is the place central to the individual writer’s formative years. Hence, a writer whose imagination is nurtured by the South becomes a Southern writer. The Southern writer also sees himself or herself as being different.Less
This chapter attempts to provide a definition for a Southern woman writer. It asks: Who or what is a Southern woman writer? Should the emphasis be placed on Southern or on woman, or equally on both? An examination of writers who are or have been considered Southern yields the following attributes. One is that place of birth in itself is not a major factor in determining a Southern writer. More important than place of birth is the place central to the individual writer’s formative years. Hence, a writer whose imagination is nurtured by the South becomes a Southern writer. The Southern writer also sees himself or herself as being different.
Noel Polk
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781934110843
- eISBN:
- 9781604733235
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781934110843.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Generations of southern writers and readers after William Faulkner have adopted his vision, seeing “The South” through his eyes rather than through their own or struggling against that vision. ...
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Generations of southern writers and readers after William Faulkner have adopted his vision, seeing “The South” through his eyes rather than through their own or struggling against that vision. Writers such as Walker Percy and Barry Hannah, who deal with a more urban world than Faulkner does, have occasionally had a hard time with many traditional critics who believe that they represent a decline in “southern literature.” These are the same critics who have too often lumped Eudora Welty and Faulkner together, who have argued that their literary strengths lie directly in their roots in the South. One of Faulkner’s most intimate works, the quasi-autobiographical “Mississippi” (1953), depicts his attempts to grapple with the problems and pressures his native land had caused for him, as well as his reconciliation with past and present Mississippi. The questions of how and why love is better than hate, reconciliation better than alienation, are also present in Welty in general, and in her novel The Golden Apples in particular. However, Welty’s responses to such questions are quite different from those of Faulkner.Less
Generations of southern writers and readers after William Faulkner have adopted his vision, seeing “The South” through his eyes rather than through their own or struggling against that vision. Writers such as Walker Percy and Barry Hannah, who deal with a more urban world than Faulkner does, have occasionally had a hard time with many traditional critics who believe that they represent a decline in “southern literature.” These are the same critics who have too often lumped Eudora Welty and Faulkner together, who have argued that their literary strengths lie directly in their roots in the South. One of Faulkner’s most intimate works, the quasi-autobiographical “Mississippi” (1953), depicts his attempts to grapple with the problems and pressures his native land had caused for him, as well as his reconciliation with past and present Mississippi. The questions of how and why love is better than hate, reconciliation better than alienation, are also present in Welty in general, and in her novel The Golden Apples in particular. However, Welty’s responses to such questions are quite different from those of Faulkner.
Stephen Schryer
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781503603677
- eISBN:
- 9781503606081
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9781503603677.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter explores the persistence of community action as an ideal in post-1960s black feminist fiction, focusing on Alice Walker’s Meridian and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters. Both writers ...
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This chapter explores the persistence of community action as an ideal in post-1960s black feminist fiction, focusing on Alice Walker’s Meridian and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters. Both writers began their careers as social workers associated with War on Poverty programs; both were also influenced by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s version of community action, implemented during the 1964 Freedom Summer. In their novels, Walker and Bambara explore the legacy of the civil rights movement, focusing on intraracial class divisions that community action was supposed to suture. In both novels, these divisions turn out to be ineradicable, and their persistence marks the Southern folk aesthetic—the influential version of process art that Walker, Bambara, and other black feminist writers created in the 1970s.Less
This chapter explores the persistence of community action as an ideal in post-1960s black feminist fiction, focusing on Alice Walker’s Meridian and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters. Both writers began their careers as social workers associated with War on Poverty programs; both were also influenced by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s version of community action, implemented during the 1964 Freedom Summer. In their novels, Walker and Bambara explore the legacy of the civil rights movement, focusing on intraracial class divisions that community action was supposed to suture. In both novels, these divisions turn out to be ineradicable, and their persistence marks the Southern folk aesthetic—the influential version of process art that Walker, Bambara, and other black feminist writers created in the 1970s.
Winifred Morgan
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617037689
- eISBN:
- 9781621039389
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617037689.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This chapter examines the legacy of southern frontier humor beyond the southern local color tradition by focusing on the trickster. It shows the reemergence of the trickster as con artist in ...
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This chapter examines the legacy of southern frontier humor beyond the southern local color tradition by focusing on the trickster. It shows the reemergence of the trickster as con artist in contemporary southern literature, thus continuing the legacy of a Euro-American counterpart, a literary cross of the traits of both Jack and antebellum southern rogues such as Simon Suggs and Sut Lovingood. The chapter looks at tricksters in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), Mark Childress’s Crazy in Alabama (1997) and Georgia Bottoms (2011), and Clyde Edgerton’s Walking Across Egypt (1987), Killer Diller (1991), and The Bible Salesman (2008).Less
This chapter examines the legacy of southern frontier humor beyond the southern local color tradition by focusing on the trickster. It shows the reemergence of the trickster as con artist in contemporary southern literature, thus continuing the legacy of a Euro-American counterpart, a literary cross of the traits of both Jack and antebellum southern rogues such as Simon Suggs and Sut Lovingood. The chapter looks at tricksters in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), Mark Childress’s Crazy in Alabama (1997) and Georgia Bottoms (2011), and Clyde Edgerton’s Walking Across Egypt (1987), Killer Diller (1991), and The Bible Salesman (2008).
Marcus Hamilton
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781496802330
- eISBN:
- 9781496804990
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496802330.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter discusses the work of Cormac McCarthy, whose early novels depicted the poor white southerner. In The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, Robert Benson praises McCarthy for his ...
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This chapter discusses the work of Cormac McCarthy, whose early novels depicted the poor white southerner. In The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, Robert Benson praises McCarthy for his vivid and honest portrayal of east Tennessee and its people—the lower classes in particular. Benson accurately characterizes McCarthy's work as a critical shift in the representation of lower-class characters in southern literature. McCarthy's focus on exploring and illuminating the lives of those often called “white trash” suggests a direct and important link between his work of the 1960s and early 1970s and the work of later southern writers invested in recovering the poor white southerner from the margins of literary representation. And yet, for several reasons, McCarthy's connection to later Rough South writers is decidedly complex. Furthermore, not all critics have been as quick as Benson to praise McCarthy's portrayal of southern poor whites. This chapter examines McCarthy's first three novels: The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark (1968), and Child of God (1973).Less
This chapter discusses the work of Cormac McCarthy, whose early novels depicted the poor white southerner. In The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, Robert Benson praises McCarthy for his vivid and honest portrayal of east Tennessee and its people—the lower classes in particular. Benson accurately characterizes McCarthy's work as a critical shift in the representation of lower-class characters in southern literature. McCarthy's focus on exploring and illuminating the lives of those often called “white trash” suggests a direct and important link between his work of the 1960s and early 1970s and the work of later southern writers invested in recovering the poor white southerner from the margins of literary representation. And yet, for several reasons, McCarthy's connection to later Rough South writers is decidedly complex. Furthermore, not all critics have been as quick as Benson to praise McCarthy's portrayal of southern poor whites. This chapter examines McCarthy's first three novels: The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark (1968), and Child of God (1973).
George Garrett
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781496803382
- eISBN:
- 9781496806789
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496803382.003.0030
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter discusses the influence of William Faulkner on young writers, arguing that no contemporary writer can ignore his work. It contends that it is especially difficult to be a “southern” ...
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This chapter discusses the influence of William Faulkner on young writers, arguing that no contemporary writer can ignore his work. It contends that it is especially difficult to be a “southern” writer, that is, a writer born and raised in the South, at home with its traditions and history, and to follow in time after Faulkner. One of the most exciting discoveries about Faulkner for the young southern writer is his use of the material of southern life and history. Southern writers are very much aware that Faulkner did not invent his material. It was there to be mined and explored. The close student and the scholar of southern literature become increasingly aware of how much of that basic material was already a part of the literary tradition of the South before Faulkner appeared on the scene. The essay also considers the extent of the influence of the film on Faulkner's fiction.Less
This chapter discusses the influence of William Faulkner on young writers, arguing that no contemporary writer can ignore his work. It contends that it is especially difficult to be a “southern” writer, that is, a writer born and raised in the South, at home with its traditions and history, and to follow in time after Faulkner. One of the most exciting discoveries about Faulkner for the young southern writer is his use of the material of southern life and history. Southern writers are very much aware that Faulkner did not invent his material. It was there to be mined and explored. The close student and the scholar of southern literature become increasingly aware of how much of that basic material was already a part of the literary tradition of the South before Faulkner appeared on the scene. The essay also considers the extent of the influence of the film on Faulkner's fiction.
